Ever since I started with Tone, I’ve been getting the odd complaint, or snide remark, about the cover girl.

Sometimes it’s about the “standard” of the girl (the comments coming from both women and men), and sometimes it’s about the fact that there’s a cover girl at all.

The usual complaint is that a technology magazine has no place having a cover girl. That she’s not relevant, out of context, and serves no purpose other to act as decoration to pull in potential readers.

It’s been a vexed issue and one that never goes away. For a while we tried to give the cover girl some context, but there’s only so many products you can get a pretty girl to hold or pose with before it all starts to look familiar.

The latest cover is probably the best quality we’ve ever had in terms of photography and production values, but I’ve had several letters and one enraged phone message (“I’m canceling my subscription! I won’t take this home to my wife!”). The problem, apart from the fact that she’s sexy and female, is that she doesn’t have a context, she’s just standing there looking pretty.

That some Kiwi readers are so enraged by this probably says more about our society than it does about the magazine. Tone’s equivalents in the UK, T3 and Stuff magazines, are outrageously over the top in their choice of scantily-clad female, and Tone is well, toned-down by comparison! Is it the fact that we’re such a small, slightly puritanical society? But hang on a minute, you can see much more full-on displays of sexuality on prime time free to air TV these days than anything you’ll see in Tone!

I thought I’d write this blog, because it’s my LAST WORD on the subject of the Tone cover girl. It gets boring replying to reader letters and taking phone calls about this subject, when I’d really rather be putting my heart and soul into making Tone the very best exposition of hot technology.

For the record, if the decision was mine to make, I’d create a Tone cover that was more along the lines of Wired magazine: you know, an artistic depiction or representation of a theme or feature inside the magazine. But my publishers would consider this commercial suicide, and you know what? They’re probably right. After all, as good as it is, Wired sells about 3 copies in New Zealand, and Tone is the leading consumer tech magazine.

More and more around the world, magazine covers are more the domain of publishers, as well as promotion and marketing people within publishing companies. The old days of editors having cart blanche to decide what goes on the magazine cover are gone, gone, gone. Those readers who get all holier than thou about a cover image they don’t “approve” of need to think things through. The cover is merely a marketing device, it’s the CONTENT that matters.

I know Tone magazine isn’t perfect. Hell, there’d be nothing to aspire to if it was. But this ever-evolving organism is full of fantastic stuff each issue, and of that, I’m proud.

This is me saying: I’m opting out of further debate about the Tone cover girl. If she offends you that much that you won’t buy Tone, then that’s just unfortunate (for you). Let’s face it, for every person that expresses discontent with the cover girl (probably around three or four people every two months) there are many thousands of seemingly satisfied readers out there.

Meanwhile, I’ll get on with the important stuff.

Gary